What's the point of a $5000 "gaming PC"?

[msmith537]

@Miller

If the point where you say “screw it” and buy an XBox instead of a PC exists anywhere on your spectrum, you’re wasting your time worrying about high end PCs versus midrange PCs. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s like asking about the difference between a Jaguar and a Ferrari, and wondering at what point do you say, “screw it” and buy a Volvo. If you can be happy with a Volvo, you’re wasting your time and money worrying about sports cars.

Well that’s my question. Is the graphics that much better that comparing an XBox360 to an Alienware PC is like a Volvo to a Ferrari or is it more like a Ferrari to a McLaran F1? Is it just a conceit of hard-core game afficionados?

[RandomLetterAssortment]

It is not just the graphics looking better than a Xbox 360, games run a lot smother, due to the higher framerates. Quite a few games on the 360 will chug down to <30 fps in places while a high end computer won’t have that - a single Geforce 8800 GTX won’t drop that low, even running at 2560x1600 resolution (which is almost twice as many pixels as the max 1920x1080 the Xbox 360 supports) with 4x AA & 16x AF. Link to benchmarks.

[Baron_Greenback]

@and_1

If I did have unlimited money of course I’d spend $5k. But that’s because I’d buy the processors that are brand new ($1,000+). And buy 30"+ LCD screens. And buy the industrial $1,500 raid controller for my 12 500gb harddrives that I’d put in RAID 0 so my average read speeds wouldn’t be 50-100 MB/s, but more like 500 MB/s+. I’d like to shave my 3ds max load times from 40 seconds down to 15 on it’s first load, and reduce windows xp’s load time as well.

• bolding mine.

Hehe, what do you use 6Tb for? Just game data or is your setup a massive media centre as well?

[Tastes_of_Chocolate]

@boytyperanma

The point of 2 video cards is so you can be watching your porno clips on one monitor while playing your game on the other.

Sort of wrong. It is possible to put 2 video cards into 1 computer, and have them display seperate outputs, but in highend machines, that’s not what is being done. The 2 video cards are linked by an SLI bridge which allows 2 video cards to be used to product 1 output. This gives you faster rendering (drawing) for games.